Media Guidance

Press Release, Article Guidance, Quotes, and Images

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) encourages writers of all articles, blogs, and other media-related activities to reach out to the organization before publishing so our team can help provide any necessary guidance, support, or additional promotion. The organization is also able to provide supplementary content such as article quotes, images, and video upon request. If you are in the process of putting a piece together on the organization, reach out to us through our website contact form.

If you would like more information about the consortium such as our boiler plate, joining our mailing list for the latest and greatest updates in geospatial, and more, refer to our news section. In regards to any materials published on the website, in social media or other areas, the organization will also offer use upon request.

Names of OGC Standards

Each OGC standard has a full name, for example, the OGC® Web Map Service Interface Standard. (Note that while the name of the organization is no longer Open GIS Consortium, and while we now refer to our “adopted specifications” as “OGC Standards,” the standards are still referred to as OpenGIS specifications in some older documents.) Use the “®” symbol after the first use of OGC in a document. OGC, Open GIS and OpenGIS are all registered trademarks of the OGC.

Be sure to check the name of the standard, as some have changed. In doubt? Check here.

Describing a Product as Compliant

A software product may be only be called compliant to an OGC standard if it has passed an OGC compliance test under direct OGC staff supervision and the product vendor has paid a trademark license fee to OGC. Once that process is complete, the product is listed here as compliant. It is not correct to say that a product is simply compliant – you must indicate to which specification and which version, as in “This product is compliant with the OGC® Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard, version 1.3.”

If you want to refer to a product that implements a specification, but has not met the requirements for compliance, you may say that the product implements one or more specifications: example “Product X implements the OGC® Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard version 1.3 and the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.2.1.”

Use of OGC Logo in Articles, Press Releases

If you wish to use the consortium’s logo for any type of collateral, media, or other items, reach out to us through our website contact form.